Can I get rid of MTA?
 

"Starting MTA" takes an inordinately long time and I was wondering if I could bypass it? It would cut boot time by more than half!

You can get rid of it but you'll miss some local mail reports from unauthorized sudo, snort mails and some such.
Don't know which mta you have though but "dpkg -l |grep mta" might tell. Could be exim if I'll take a guess.

A standard install is going to come with exim, so that's probably what you've got.

I've never noticed exim taking up much time on my system. Maybe run eximconfig (wait, on Woody it was eximconfig, now it's dpkg-reconfigure exim I believe) and make sure it's only set up for local delivery... That *may* affect startup time (let us know).

Don't try removing exim unless you know what you're doing, and are probably familiar with the equivs package.

You could also see at the startupscripts and just keep it from starting at bootup with:
update-rc.d -f exim remove
if exim is the name of course, "ls -l /etc/init.d/ |grep exim" will tell.

Doh. Right makuyl. :)

Okay, stupid me, I went and removed it entirely before trying to reconfigure. Is there a way to get it back to see if reconfiguring would have worked? :eek:

If you removed it with something like: apt-get remove exim
you can install it with: apt-get install exim

Nope, I used update-rc.d to remove it. Is there a way to re-instate something that has been removed from the boot-up in such a manner?


Edit:
I tried it on my server which I did not mess with yet:

debian:/etc/init.d# dpkg-reconfigure exim4
debian:/etc/init.d#


No error message, but no reconfigurator either. :(

I don't quite see why you want it back but: update-rc.d exim defaults
or if you want to start it at different runlevels on specific values:
update-rc.d exim start 70 2 3 4 5 . stop 70 0 1 6 .

I don't actually want it back, but if I should decide to disable something else (apache2, or other things I don't have a use for at this time), I just wanted to know if there was a way to get them back in case I wanted them later.

Thanks!

Re: Can I get rid of MTA?
 

I have two systems with Sarge 3.1r0a installed. One, like yours, experiences a long pause when starting MTA. The other does not (I don't know why).

Being more old school Unix and not up on the newest configuration widgets that are available with a modern Linux distribution (still a Linux Newbie)...

As root I just cd'ed to /etc/rc2.d and renamed S20exim4 to s20exim4 (note the uppercase to lowercase change for the first letter). Ditto for the same file in /etc/rc3.d, rc4.d, and rc5.d Then I manually killed the exim that was currently running with "/etc/init.d/exim4 stop".

Just to clear things up a bit:

"apt-get remove foo" uninstalls software from your machine (leaving the config files in-place).

"update-rc.d foo ..." doesn't uninstall anything. It just modifies some links like haertig did, but does it for you.

There's an even easier package to use, instead of update-rc.d: it's called sysvconfig, and it's a front-end to update-rc.d.

BTW, I think it's "dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config" rather than "dpkg-reconfigure exim4".

You could just do sudo rcconf and untick exim,apache,cups,etc and whatever else you do not need now and it wont start at boot time.If you need it in the future just rcconf again and tick it,exit,reboot.

rcconf and sysvconfig do pretty much the same thing.

Though, it seems as if rcconf has been getting updated more often:
http://packages.debian.org/changelog...0.10/changelog
http://packages.debian.org/changelog...1.15/changelog

Haven't used either in a long time, but IIRC, sysvconfig was more user-friendly.

This is a common question. It's typically related to an unsuccessful reverse DNS lookup that the Mail Transfer Agent tried to do. Usually - I've figured out -, this is caused by incorrect information in /etc/resolv.conf.

For example, if you're not planning to use (outgoing) mail at all on your server you would set up exim4 (the default MTA on Debian) such that it delivers mail locally only. You can configure this with:
The main point to resolve the issue, however, is /etc/resolv.conf. For local delivery it should look like this:
For "real" domains (and local delivery) I've seen it works fine also when you simply omit the nameserver, e.g:
Hope this helps.